The This Tape Will Self Destruct project created a printer that produces documents that self-destruct, with the printouts bursting into fire after just a short time from leaving the machine.
Diego Trujillo Pisanty, the creator of the printer, discussed the project on his personal website, stating that it is an intersection of "our current techno-political status and Cold War spy fiction."
The project uses a printer to create the self-destructing documents, which contain a mixture of pictures and words. The images and text are a combination of content extracted from fictional stories of the Cold War and portions of recently revealed secret documents.
Each self-destructing document is described by Pisanty as an "amalgam that blurs the line between present reality and past fiction."
After a short time from being printed out, the documents catch fire, with the contents of the documents forever erased when the flames burn up the paper.
"Making the iconic self-destructing document real through a functional machine revalidates Cold War fictions in the context of our contemporary values surrounding secrecy," Pisanty wrote.
Pisanty drew inspiration for the project from real-life events that recently occurred. The first event is the report of BBC last year that a security agency in Russia will be going back to using typewriters so that sensitive documents will not be leaked. The second event is the video released by The Guardian that showed how its editors destroyed computers that contained the NSA files that Edward Snowden famously leaked.
Pisanty connected the events to the Cold War because the issue centered around the espionage being carried out by governments for the security of their countries is more apt for the political-military tension that characterized the Cold War than for the modern living that the people have grown accustomed to.
The self-destructing documents created by the printer are made out of thermal paper, which is the kind of paper used for most tape receipts. As the printout is processed, it is coated with a potassium salt and glycerol.
The combination of these two substances leads to an exothermic reaction that releases heat and produces flames. The heat of the reaction also turns any unburnt portions of the paper black, as that is a characteristic of the thermal paper.
Pisanty said that the pictures and words extracted from fiction on the Cold War were mostly from 007 movies, the Mission: Impossible TV series of the 1960s, the Macgyver TV series, and movies such as Dr. Strangelove and The Conversation.
The secret documents that the project works with were initially intended to be the ones that were leaked by Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. However, Pisanty said that is it very difficult to find primary sources for the documents, so he resorted to obtaining documents mainly from non-government organizations and news agencies such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Guardian and The Intercept.
